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Ecological Modernization

Ecological modernization is shorthand for two ideas: (1) that it is possible to maintain or increase the rate of economic growth and protect the environment and (2) that diseconomies and ecological harm may be diminished by policy correctives and technological fixes that design environmental criteria into economic systems. Its apparent appeal lies in its capacity to generate positive-sum solutions to problems conceived as zero sum, move beyond remedial and regulatory environmental strategies of the 1970s, avoid structural change seen as intractably difficult, and accommodate (however uncomfortably) both radical environmental critiques and neoliberal economic practices. In short, the term refers to the restructuring of the capitalist economy along environmentally sound lines. Nevertheless, it has been criticized for perpetuating social injustices, economic unfairness, and environmental harm because it remains inside the capitalist system, from which stem many of the problems of modernization.

Modernization and Globalization

Modernization is a term and idea describing various pathways for human and social development and various changes in social and spatial relations over time. These processes involve modifications to production and consumption, as well as adjustments to industrial practices, land use, migration, settlement, transportation and social, economic, and political organization. Modernization and globalization are interrelated, the latter enacted or operating at various spatial scales. It gives effect to increased and accelerated flows of financial and other transactions, capital, resources, goods and services, ideas, people, or communications. These flows are unevenly distributed, with varying consequences, both positive and negative.

Concerns about the harmful effects of modernization and globalization have given rise to diverse environmental values. Emphasis is sometimes placed on the intrinsic or essential worth of nature or the environment. Sometimes the instrumental or practical worth of such entities for human needs and desires is stressed. On balance, however, whether environmental values arise from self-interest or selflessness, they prompt calls for nature or the environment to be better conserved and managed, given the growth and globalization of modernization's damaging effects. Among such effects are poverty, malnutrition and ill health, excessive consumption and the unfair distribution of goods and services, anthropogenic or human-induced climate change, and habitat and species loss. Such loss occurs across all habitat types at all latitudes and arises from inappropriate forms of urbanization, primary and secondary production, and other human activities and from the pollution of the environment by hazardous substances.

The Emergence of Sustainable Development and Neoliberalism

Sustainable development is one prominent response to such effects, gaining rapid authority in international governmental circles from the mid 1980s via work by the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED). The WCED described sustainable development as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs, stressing the crucial need to ease poverty and work within social and technological limits. The idea began to displace the established, if controversial, agenda that questioned unfettered economic growth (free market capitalism), and sought to promote local economic self-sufficiency and a steady-state approach. Among the chief advocates of such economic reform, the ecological economist Herman Daly suggested that the modern “evils of growthmania”—a prevailing attitude that there is no such thing as enough—cause social injustice, economic malfunction, and environmental harm.

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